It's not on Wei Wuxian to be the one stepping forward, only it is, and so he does step forward, scoffs quietly but doesn't let the folded arms of his brother keep him from doing what once his brother did for him.
"I might know more, but I'm hardly more experienced." Dragging rabbits out of a cave to live on a mountainside instead, scooping them up for fluffy nose brushes and holding in warm hands those small, warm, soft bodies. He isn't a staple of Gusu Lan, to know their rearing or tending, but Lan Zhan knows, and so he supposes he'll learn, as he always does.
No, right now is for pulling Jiang Cheng into a hug, where his lack of experience slowly taught here between the youngsters and in his patched together brotherhood with Jiang Cheng means he knows the motions. Remembers when it'd mattered to him that the horror of months he wouldn't claim directly could be swallowed, accepted, as someone having missed him enough to embrace him while berating him, and that it'd been the last time between them where things had been terrible and yet, somehow, also almost okay.
No memory of hands around a throat, or injuries done in performance later, or the sword that never struck flesh but lodged in stone and sacrificed the stability of the ledge they stood on.
"Thank you for being my brother," he says instead of the countless other things, "And I'm sorry you're going to have to do this twice, but you can manage. Reach out to me, A-Cheng. I'm too much a fool to assume that invitation."
It's not fair, but none of growing up, enduring the world, and being the one left behind to life while death swallows the rest is fair. He knows Jiang Cheng can manage anyway. Has utter faith that he will.
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"I might know more, but I'm hardly more experienced." Dragging rabbits out of a cave to live on a mountainside instead, scooping them up for fluffy nose brushes and holding in warm hands those small, warm, soft bodies. He isn't a staple of Gusu Lan, to know their rearing or tending, but Lan Zhan knows, and so he supposes he'll learn, as he always does.
No, right now is for pulling Jiang Cheng into a hug, where his lack of experience slowly taught here between the youngsters and in his patched together brotherhood with Jiang Cheng means he knows the motions. Remembers when it'd mattered to him that the horror of months he wouldn't claim directly could be swallowed, accepted, as someone having missed him enough to embrace him while berating him, and that it'd been the last time between them where things had been terrible and yet, somehow, also almost okay.
No memory of hands around a throat, or injuries done in performance later, or the sword that never struck flesh but lodged in stone and sacrificed the stability of the ledge they stood on.
"Thank you for being my brother," he says instead of the countless other things, "And I'm sorry you're going to have to do this twice, but you can manage. Reach out to me, A-Cheng. I'm too much a fool to assume that invitation."
It's not fair, but none of growing up, enduring the world, and being the one left behind to life while death swallows the rest is fair. He knows Jiang Cheng can manage anyway. Has utter faith that he will.